Spring 2017

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Professional and Biographical Information

Degrees

Ph.D., Princeton University (2014)

M.A., Brown University (2008)

B.A., University of Cambridge, UK (2006)

Research Interests

My current book project, Lonely Poets and their Publics, charts the development of the concept of loneliness in British literature of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Loneliness was a new term in the seventeenth century, and is distinct from solitude, because it describes an experience that can take place amidst other people, as well as apart from them. The invention of the concept therefore signals a revolution in developing notions of selfhood, individuality, and interiority. I am interested the question of why poets, as opposed to novelists or journalists, were particularly drawn to loneliness as a mode of self-fashioning. In a series of case studies of literary loneliness, on Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth and British Poetry of Abolition, I trace representations of loneliness in this period, and argue that it paradoxically emerges as a strategy by which Romantic writers create community with each other and with their increasingly lonely reading publics.

Teaching Interests

I specialize in literature written in Britain from 1660-1830, with a particular emphasis on poetry. At Amherst, I teach several classes on British Romantic literature, such as "Nature and Imagination in the Romantic Era" and "Solitude and the Self in British Romanticism," and "The Wordsworths." The connections between British literature written in the Romantic period and literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is central to both my research and my teaching. This is in evidence in my classes "Early Women Writers" and "Making Literary Histories II," a survey of eighteenth-century literature and culture. I also enjoy venturing outside of my research period, to teach the history of poetry more broadly. In “Reading Poetry,” and “Amherst Poets,” I teach the tools and methods needed to engage with anglophone poetry from various periods.

“‘Draw me a Picture’: A New Approach to Teaching Poetry,” Co-written with Prof. William Gleason, The Princeton Guide to Teaching Literature. Eds. Diana Fuss and William Gleason. Princeton University Press, 2015. pp.287-290.